Web Design 3.0: When Your Web Design Matters

We love Web Design. Web Design is our life. Web Design is vital. We must capitolize Web Design every time we say Web Design. Capitalize on Web Design today!

I think that there is much to learn from 'electronic music'. This differed from what came before in the way that the web differed from print. With early techno music you could press a few buttons on a gadget box and it would play the beat for you, on top of this you could sample things and mix them in. Before that drummers had to actually keep time and singers had to hit their notes.

Then computers came along. Some of the early techno pioneers didn't have a clue how to use a computer. They were stuck using the early electronic gadgets and the workflow that went with it.

Then a new generation came along that could use the computers and could do everything on an Apple laptop without having to have a bedroom full of turntables, forests of wires, keyboards, samplers and drum machines.

The older guys stuck with the original tools for 'electronic music' still linger around but the tools for the job have changed. Had they been born a generation later with the same passion for music they would have gone straight to the computer stage.

Getting back to web development, I think we have something similar going on. A generation of web designers got used to developing with the desktop publishing tools and static mockups in PDF form. Responsive design for mobile for them was just a doubling of their workload using these same methods. They are very much stuck on things like 'pixel sizes' and much else that doesn't really relate to how it is done.

I think that future designers will work very differently, essentially thinking in terms of what can be done to content instead of placeholder copy with CSS, SVG and javascript animation.

The reason we are not there yet is pretty much the same as it was with music, you need a new generation to come along to think in terms of the new ways of working.

Right now it seems that the website builder services such as Squarespace are of great appeal to people. A few years ago a freelance designer could build a website for a local business with Wordpress but now they use Squarespace. The bloat does not matter to them. It looks good and who cares if it is not using CSS grid?

At the other end of the spectrum, sizeable businesses with web development teams are stuck like the early electronic music artists are. They have a visual design process, the 'agile' religion and plenty of excuses for not using CSS grid or even the full vocabulary of HTML5 elements one would use if taking a content driven design path.

I am looking forward to the changes that are likely to happen as the new generation gain more confidence and demonstrate better, quicker results by using better HTML5 and the full range of CSS grid. I can't see website builder services such as Squarespace being able to keep people happy with bloated web pages forever and, when it becomes possible to get results with native HTML5/CSS without having a behemoth of a dev team, there should be design progress.

Is it? I think it shows some chutzpah to write such a long article defending such a thesis, but it's also completely wrong and thus not very good. We already had this: It was called Killer Websites or later Flash pages. We killed it with fire when the web professionalized.

There are two forces at play here: On the one hand you have those print inspired designer types, boosted by the possibilities of modern browsers. On the other hand you have the usability requirements and the dictate of the form factor: If you do a mobile website you need a very simple grid, responsive for bigger screens yes, but the focus is on structure and content. Free placement of stuff according to print design ideals of magazine cover pages is completely useless there, the phone screen is too small for that anyway.

What we end up with is the current design: Very formalized pages for the most part, with lots of possibilities to experiment thanks to evolving browser capabilities while keeping the standardized structure. This will lead to further evolution of what is a modern design, but I doubt we will see a complete new paradigm anytime soon - as long as technology remains as constant as it was the last 10 to 20 years. Foldable phone screens might move the needle a little, if they ever come down from the uber-premium price segment vendors target right now and don't turn out to be a useless gimmick

One thing to keep in mind: Yes, web design is new, but because we already had print design before it adopted very much very fast. This is not a completely new field that still has to match what humans actually need, it already took that from existing research and practices. That's why it could evolve and settle down that fast, and that's why the article is wrong in predicting the next grand revolution, that happens to need their website builder.

I guess I'm confused by Nicepage being "Web Design 3.0", being told Bootstrap is yesteryear, then using Bootstrap 3.x.x (and a boatload of jQueryUI dependencies) with !important directives sprinkled all over the place. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty on the front-end, but the technical choices are still rather confusing after reading the article.

https://nicepage.com/Content/BundledScripts/main-libs.js https://nicepage.com/Content/BundledScripts/main-libs.css

Additionally, I have yet to find a page builder that's in any way 1) performant and 2) not compromising fundamental best practices (because WYSIWYG site builders require exorbitant amounts of flexibility).

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/190305_4Y_ff1823195f2bedd...

I liked the article and agree with the central thesis of CSS Grid enabling some wild UI designs, but the whole thing came off in a completely different light after looking under the hood.

How serious is this vs. tongue-in-cheek? The tone of this article (dripping with sarcasm, I think? E.g. over-repetition of "Web Design".. Web Design 3.0) seems weirdly out-of-sync with the content. If it's a Kaufman-esque joke it's done really well... if it's an actual advertisement for nicepage, it's weird... _BUT_ if it's a stealth thinkpiece about how _no_ design really matters if your content is off, it's absolutely brilliant...